Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…
dumb terminal happened, it's called the browser. Most folks live in their browsers and get on by fine with tablets, phones and chromebooks
It is a bicycle for the mind. Remember back when if you wanted to learn about a topic, you had to travel to a library, spend a couple hours looking up books in a card catalogue, and then find 1 book, that maybe answers your question. I'm constantly using the internet to learn new things, to learn about all kinds of things (e.g. Californian urchin galls, best way to process small branches for firewood, the use bison h…
Put another way, computers and the Internet are a tool to accelerate the process of becoming more of what you are. If what you are is a curious, humble person looking to understand the world better, it can help with that. If you're a vicious self-promoter looking to crush everyone on your way to the top, it can help with that too. If you're a terrorist looking for how to build a bomb or fly a plane or use certain gun…
I really believed computers would make people smarter, better informed, able to make more rational decisions. They'd understand and trust science more, make better political decisions. We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... I was so naive...
It did make people better, more informed even if wrongly
There is this Jobs interview when he also discusses how there will be a marketplace for objects and people will buy and sell objects instead of software. In one sense it failed because all it ever saves you is the typing. You still have to learn the whole model, sometimes it is like learning a programming language from scratch. On the other hand, it may have succeeded. Objects don't exist in isolation but as a librar…
There was a market for components back in the nineties. People were buying VBX's and OCX's for Visual Basic and Delphi applications. Component Source had a huge catalogue. Open source killed it all.
More generally speaking, markets were killed by oligopolies.
I remember talking in mid 99 about ipv6, while I was at a web company. Immediately on seeing it I said "this is crazy, and isn't going to take off". "Why not?" I got from some of the network folks there. My response then is mostly as it is now - it's just too confusing to read and write. The UIs - even at the time - telling people to put in a dotted quad - were... manageable. 4 is an easy number to understand. Number…
That's why we have the DNS. People know names, not numbers. Use AAAA records.
Today people don't even remember DNS names anymore. They just use the search engine/advertisement provider of choice. DNS is of course still very useful to separate service names from physical architecture so you can move stuff around. But I hardly ever see people typing in DNS names or using bookmarks these days.
Graduated with a BS in Mechanical Eng in '96. Like a number of other commenters mentioned, folks like me who were in STEM majors all had to learn how to code in some form or another, though I don't think I ever took any classes as such. A popular joke then: "what do mechanical engineers do when they graduate?" "they learn to code and become programmers" In my case, I had a part-time job in a lab writing programs in C…
My older brother did this and his advice to me entering college in 1999 was don’t waste your time and go directly into computer science you’ll end up there anyway… so that’s what I did
OP here. You're free to contribute too. I'm of the opinion that the '90s was a massively successful if not revolutionary showing for tech towards both consumers and insiders (academics, startups, working programmers, et al.) as well as a heyday for irrational exuberance. I don't think that was the case in the '70s and '80s where, for example, most who came in contact with computers treated them as flashy typewriters, toys, or defense industry lab projects. There didn't seem to be much in the way of "something new" aside from Usenet or BBSs. Maybe early 3D ray tracing, Hypercard, A/V capabilities (i.e. MIDI, Genlocks, 16-bit color), etc. But all in all, the 70's and 80's seemed more like an era of standardization than an era of realized experimentation (Amiga excluded). If there was a revolution in the making, it was (outside of insider circles or corporations) bubbling underneath rather than exploding into view. But I could be mistaken in my assessment if you'll enlighten me.
It is a bicycle for the mind. Remember back when if you wanted to learn about a topic, you had to travel to a library, spend a couple hours looking up books in a card catalogue, and then find 1 book, that maybe answers your question. I'm constantly using the internet to learn new things, to learn about all kinds of things (e.g. Californian urchin galls, best way to process small branches for firewood, the use bison h…
Put another way, computers and the Internet are a tool to accelerate the process of becoming more of what you are. If what you are is a curious, humble person looking to understand the world better, it can help with that. If you're a vicious self-promoter looking to crush everyone on your way to the top, it can help with that too. If you're a terrorist looking for how to build a bomb or fly a plane or use certain gun…
This sounds too simplistic (idealistic?). Maybe computers at their core are indeed pure, neutral information, but internet is definitely more than just that. It also amplifies all kinds of adverse mass psychology effects, rewards herd behavior, enables propaganda wars, provides means to monitor and control population at unprecedented scale, etc. I'm not saying that you're completely wrong, but I think you might be willing to see only the brighter side of it.
Not a 90s programmer, but I think one of the greater fallacies of the optimistic 90s and early naughts was a belief that technology in general and Internet (cyberspace) in particular will be able to remedy many of humanity's woes. It turned out that, at the end of the day, even very sophisticated technology is infinitely inferior to quite simple and very well understood economic forces and political will.
> Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs) The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is. I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is…